How to Write in Standard Form for Scientific Notation

In scientific notation you are going to have a number which is 1 through 10. Write in standard form for scientific notation with help from a professional private tutor in this free video clip.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Rachel, and today we're going to be going over how to write in standard form for scientific notation. In scientific notation you are going to have a number which is 1 through 10, you have to use those digits and you are going to multiply it, I just wrote X as a variable by 10 to some power. So what does that mean? Well let's say we have a number 2,356. We want to write that in scientific notation. Well we have to put it as a digit of 1 through 10 so we have to do 2.356. Now we see where did we move the decimal point from? We moved it from here, right, at the end of the number and we moved it over 1, 2, 3 times. So, we're going to multiply 10 to the third because if you multiply 10 to the third, right, that's 1,000 and that will give us 2.356, multiply by 10 to the third, gives us 2,356. So that's how we write that in scientific notation. Let's look at it the other way. If we have something like .00008. That's a really small number. That's going to be in the other direction. We're going to move, we want it to be between 1 and 10 so we want it to be 8, right? So we're going to move it over 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times. So we have 8 times 10. Now this is to the negative 5 because it's actually getting right, it's actually much smaller than we are representing so we want to show it, right, that it's actually a much smaller number. So when you are moving the decimal point to the right it's going to be negative and when you have to move it to the left, it's going to be positive. And those are two forms of scientific notation in standard form. I'm Rachel and thank you for learning with me today.